As some of you may remember, we used to have a product called Virtualization Encoder available a few years back. The idea of that product was running scripted – or template-based – automated operations against App-V packages, without user intervention. Now, that feature is sort of back in AVE!

Like mentioned in the Lib-V release announcement a week ago, it has taken us time to come with 5.0 SP2 support in our products. But now we are happy to tell you that also our premier App-V package editor/viewer, Application Virtualization Explorer, has reached a new major 4.0 release that includes the long-awaited SP2 support.

We have had the 32-bit fixup tool available for a while (to correct issues in App-V 4.6 packages saved out from AVE prior to version 2.2.6), but since the recent events there appeared to be a need to do the opposite as well.

Recently I was involved with the customer who uses, amongst the traditional App-V Management Server –based RTSP publishing, a HTTP publishing script that was posted in the App-V Team’s blog mid-2010. This script constructs necessary APPLIST information out of manifest XML files detected on a virtual directory, but unfortunately it has some shortcomings which I decided to fix and present an enhanced version here as a replacement.

Last week I wrote about the construction, and the challenges, of the creation of a guest virtual machine -based snapshot management solution (or “tool”) for Hyper-V environments. As promised, it’s now available for downloading.

While traditionally I have been a fan of doing App-V (and before that, SoftGrid) sequencing by using a locally installed virtualization software (CHV, Client Hosted Virtualization) like VMware Workstation, for some time already I have actually resorted to using our Hyper-V environment for the sequencing purposes. This is largely because I’m using a laptop almost 100% of the time, and near ultra-portable laptop is not perhaps the best platform for doing client-side virtualization due to necessity of needing external hard drives and so forth.

ExitVe, the utility for starting processes outside App-V virtual environment, from within that environment, is now available for downloading. You can find it from our community tools page at http://www.gridmetric.com/community/free.html.

Every now and then there might be a need to start processes outside the virtual “bubble”, from within the bubble; to effect changes to the real system or examine it without Virtual Environment (VE) being in a way. Since App-V does not natively offer such a capacity, I decided to write our own tool for doing just that: escaping the VE through a hatch!

Time to get back into releasing some free tools for the benefit of the community at large! As of today we launched a new free tools page on our website, and the first new free tool that was added is simple but handy command-line tool to check what type of machine it is running on. […]